Sysadmin CYA

By Gregory Tompkins|August 20th, 2013

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Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes from a sysadmin from a large CT-based financial services company. One day not long ago he was performing routinely scheduled website maintenance at his office in Tampa, FL. Everything seemed rather normal. The web servers were humming along.

Until the complaints started pouring in. About a problem they couldn’t see. And neither could he.

As it turns out, users – including middle management – hadn’t been able to get access to the website for 45 minutes. And they were seriously unhappy.

“Naturally, I was blamed for the outage,” he reports.

He used WhatsUp Gold from the network management division of Ipswitch to see the problem he had only heard about. A few minutes later, after checking out the single dashboard and glancing at a few reports, he saw that HTTP/HTTPS/Ping had gone down on several sites. He traced the problem to an F5 load balancer issue.

In a flash, he restored access to the site.

“[Without WhatsUp Gold] it would have never been solved and I would have been blamed for a production outage!CYA – cover your ass – because the blame was pushed off of me and my maintenance!”